LITMIR.BIZ

      I get up at six. I ride south over beautiful green hills to a magnificent lake set against a backdrop of mountains. The movie Medicine Man with Sean Connery was filmed in the nearby ecoreserve. I eat breakfast on a lakeside terrace among old friends from the flower and bird kingdoms. Bougainvillea shades the terrace; there are orchids and bromeliads, egrets, herons, cormorants, a bad-tempered roadrunner up a palm tree. One bird insistently calls weeah-weeah-weeah; another, peepee-peepee; a third imitates a cat’s meow.

      Out on the lake men dive from row boats for tegogolos, a type of freshwater crab. Sun breaks over the water. The mountains are a smoky blue. A cool breeze blows off the water. Total joy. Except for the tasteless coffee.

      I ride back through San Andres to San Salvador Tuxlas. San Salvador is a small, clean, pretty town of low single-storey buildings set on a river. The largest known carved stone head from the Olmac period sits in a small temple in the middle of the central square. The massive sculpture depicts a deeply depressed gentleman – perhaps he received his tax bill in the morning post. A small museum on the square displays superb ceramics. I sign the visitors’ book.

      The curator notes my nationality: ‘The English invented football.’

      ‘No,’ I reply. ‘The English invented rules.’

      Out in the square, an early-thirties Mexican rides by on a gleaming quarter-horse. Bridle and saddle are true Mexican finery. So are his riding chaps – carved leather. Turquoise studs the silver band on his Stetson and the silver circlet on his string tie. He sits upright as a bronze statue, raised right hand drooping the reins loose. This is his town. He knows how good he looks: the equestrian equivalent of a pimp in his pimpmobile.

      The horse is gorgeous.

      I pass nothing but fat horses and fat dairy cows for the next eighty kilometres. The road follows the river through rolling hills. The land flattens and farms change from grass paddocks and clumps of woodland to fields of pineapple. Hitting federal highway 175, I turn north to Tuxtepeca. I flinch and the bike trembles as convoys of big trailer trucks thunder past. Drivers are kindly and allow me ample space. The country is flat and drier. Vast fields of pineapple seem sucked into the distant heat haze. Huge trees shade patches of water.

      I rest at a fruit-juice stand run by a plump, good-looking woman in her early thirties. She drops a whole pineapple into a press operated by a long handle of galvanised pipe on which she thrusts her full weight. She asks what country I come from. I drink juice to the Beatles (‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’) played loud on a small CD player.

      The woman is single. She tells me that Mexican men are too machisto. She dreams of living in Canada and marrying a man who treats her as an equal. She plays ‘Yellow Submarine’ as I remount. Two more hours to Tuxtepeca.

      Tuxtepeca is a modern agro-industrial city of no great interest. However, I find a good folding knife for a few dollars, a spoon and a small plastic bowl to make my own fruit salad of enormous grapes, mango and crisp apple. I have completed 470 kilometres since Veracruz on thirteen litres of gas, or roughly a hundred miles to the gallon. More important is the freedom of being on a bike, taking whatever road I wish, stopping where I want and for as long as I want. Tomorrow is the big one.

      Tuxtepeca, Thursday 18 May